Patrick Scott Belk ’ s new book , Empires of Print , is a masterful look at the development of the publishing industries at the turn of the twentieth century . The massive shift of print production from 1880 to 1920 shaped publishing in the Western world , permanently restructuring the reading public into a corpus of profitable consumers . By working together , leading publishers in the Transatlantic industry organized multiplemarket media campaigns , synchronized complex legal and contract negotiations , and created the phenomenon of the modern best-seller ( 2 ).
The pioneering efforts of stalwart establishment firms and newer , large-scale commercial publishers created one of the earliest manifestations of a true global marketplace , bringing textbooks , magazines , and inexpensive trade-paper reprints to overseas markets , foreshadowing the modern world ’ s multinational media conglomerates . Celebrity authors , in conjunction with their agents , editors , and commercial publishers , adjusted to the global print market , which increasingly looked to technological revolutions , celebrity culture , and the commercial marketplace ( 4 ). This study brings the complex , innovative efforts of publishers to generate a world-wide market into vivid and contemporaneously-relevant detail through riveting stories , spectacular visual support , and astute examples that link to publishing practices of today .
Belk ’ s particular focus here highlights what he terms the “ cross-fertilization of adventure fiction , periodical publishing , and the ‘ new mass entertainment culture ’” at work in the late nineteenth century ( 6 ). Popular authors had to complete commercially in an increasingly diverse , global market , as well as actively stay abreast of and participate in key transformations of print and periodical publishing ( 6 ). Each of the book ’ s five chapters focuses on a different set of adventure texts , presenting a chronological narrative of the expansion of publishing into overseas markets .
The first chapter lays the foundation of expansion and examines the symbiotic relationship between magazines and adventure fiction , a relationship that would critically shape literary debates between Romance and Realism at the turn of the century . Belk illuminates the vital alignment of the populist press barons at the Imperial Press Conference of 1909 , tracing the expansion of periodicals through established publishing networks as well as through the media empire . Belk notes that former prime minister Lord Rosebery emphasized that newspapers should be enduring , and had great power to both guide and embody public opinion in their provinces ( 21 ). This overview also outlines the essentials of the nineteenth-century periodical form as a popular genre .
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